In Yosemite, volunteers are picking up frozen diapers as government shutdown continues

Volunteers were helping visitors, cleaning toilets, restocking restrooms and picking up trash at Joshua Tree National Park in California on Thursday, as a partial government shutdown left the areas open to visitors but with little staff on duty. (Jan. 3)
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Anthony Martinez, 42, and Jessica Garcia, 29, pick up trash along the main road into Yosemite Valley on Jan. 2, 2019. Martinez and Garcia both spent their days off from work at nearby Tenaya Lodge to pick up trash inside Yosemite during the 2018/19 government shutdown.(Photo: Sam Gross)

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK — With few federal employees left to protect some of the nation’s most prized public land, private citizens are using their free time to keep Yosemite National Park clean as the government shutdown drags on.

On a cold January morning, Anthony Martinez stooped from a wooden footbridge in the heart of Yosemite Valley to jab an orange pick stick at a piece of tissue paper that had bonded to an icy mat of grass.

The 42-year-old tour bus driver for Tenaya Lodge, which sits just outside the park’s south entrance, wore a yellow safety vest and toted a half-full garbage bag. With the iconic 2,425-foot Yosemite Falls in the background, Martinez frowned as he poked at the frozen tissue harder and harder before eventually giving up.

“That’s going to stay there until spring,” he said with a sigh before moving down the path.

Not far down the road, he found used diapers crammed between rocks at a popular pullout.

The nation’s national parks have been left open but largely unstaffed during a protracted government shutdown nearly two weeks long.

The result has been damaging. Without the watchful eye of rangers and park stewards, visitors have been leaving garbage at vista points, bringing dogs into pet-restricted areas, driving vehicles over curbs and even pooping on the ground near padlocked restrooms.

“I thought they were kidding when they said there was feces everywhere, but there is.”

Anthony Martinez, volunteer helping to clean up Yosemite National Park

“I thought they were kidding when they said there was feces everywhere, but there is,” Martinez said, adding that he and Jessica Garcia, a fellow Tenaya Lodge employee volunteering that morning, had to chip up frozen human feces to get it into garbage bags.

In Yosemite Valley, where nighttime temperatures dip into the low 20s, much of the garbage and human waste has frozen solid and fused with the ground. The pair aren't always successful in prying it up.

“It’s going to be horrible when spring comes around and it starts to thaw,” he said, adding a blunt warning to anyone visiting when temperatures begin to warm: "Don't be barefoot."

'It gives our country a bad name'

Martinez, along with about 30 other residents and private business employees across the park that day, have been spending their free time cleaning up what the government has not.

Anthony Martinez, 42, and Jessica Garcia, 29, both spent their days off from work at nearby Tenaya Lodge to pick up trash inside Yosemite durirng the 2018/19 government shutdown. (Photo: Sam Gross/RGJ)

Not only do the trash and abuse to the park affect their business, Yosemite is their home. Martinez has lived in or near the park for eight years. Garcia, a night auditor at Tenaya Lodge, has lived there for two years.

“It gives us as a country a bad name … people are visiting from Australia, from China, from India,” Martinez said. “They come here and say, ‘Yeah, we went to see Yosemite, but it was trashed.’”

He wants those people to fall in love with the park the same way he did.

Tourists continue to funnel in. Yosemite Lodge, owned by the customer service corporation Aramark, reports that business is near or above normal for this time of year, and buses full of camera-toting tourists are still a common site at the park’s iconic vistas.

A laminated sign taped to the shuttered entry booth is all that greets visitors to Yosemite National Park at its Big Oak Flat entrance off Highway 120. Though the park is open, the ongoing government shutdown has limited park operations. (Photo: Sam Gross)

But what’s missing from the picture is the park’s staff — the rangers, stewards and others who are tasked with protecting one of the nation’s most prized public spaces. Almost all of them are furloughed.

Some federal employees are still there. Law enforcement rangers still cruise the roads, for example, and people can still check into a campsite face-to-face with an employee in the registration office.

Those employees are exempted from the furlough, their duties considered too critical to go unstaffed.

Andrew Munoz, a spokesperson for the park service, said via email that if access begins to affect safety, health or park resources, they will begin closing or restricting areas.

Yosemite has already begun restricting access from its popular southern entrance on Highway 41 due to “continuing issues with human waste and resource damage,” according to a press release. Rangers stationed at a checkpoint will allow anyone with a reservation for lodging or camping in the park to proceed, while others must enter via El Portal Road to the west.

Many park campgrounds, play areas and the famed Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias are closed.

No end in sight

The shutdown triggered on Dec. 22 when Congress and President Trump reached an impasse over funding for a wall along the Mexican border. Many federal services have ground to a halt as agencies — including the National Park Service — have been shuttered.

“I don’t like to rag on (Trump) because he’s doing the best with what he’s got,” Martinez said, clutching his garbage bag in the mostly-frozen meadow. “But to throw a tantrum and say, ‘We’re going to shut down because I didn’t get my way,’ he doesn’t realize what it does to the rest of the country.”

But as far as deciding to leave national parks open during the shutdown, that’s a tough call, he said.

On one hand, closing the park would hurt the private businesses — like the one he works for — that operate inside the park. But on the other, unsupervised visitors have abused the public land he loves so much.